PySC2 - StarCraft II Learning Environment

PySC2 is DeepMind's
Python component of the StarCraft II Learning Environment (SC2LE). It exposes
Blizzard Entertainment's StarCraft II Machine Learning
API as a Python RL Environment.
This is a collaboration between DeepMind and Blizzard to develop StarCraft II
into a rich environment for RL research. PySC2 provides an interface for RL
agents to interact with StarCraft 2, getting observations and sending actions.

We have published an accompanying
blogpost
and paper, which outlines our
motivation for using StarCraft II for DeepRL research, and some initial research
results using the environment.

About

Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product.

If you use the StarCraft II Machine Learning API and/or PySC2 in your research,
please cite the StarCraft II Paper

Quick Start Guide

Get PySC2

PyPI

The easiest way to get PySC2 is to use pip:

$ pip install pysc2

That will install the pysc2 package along with all the required dependencies.
virtualenv can help manage your
dependencies. You may also need to upgrade pip: pip install --upgrade pip
for the pysc2 install to work. If you're running on an older system you may
need to install libsdl libraries for the pygame dependency.

Pip will install a few of the binaries to your bin directory. pysc2_play can
be used as a shortcut to python -m pysc2.bin.play.

Git

Alternatively you can install PySC2 with git. First clone the PySC2 repo, then
install the dependencies and pysc2 package:

Get StarCraft II

PySC2 depends on the full StarCraft II game and only works with versions that
include the API, which is 3.16.1 and above.

Linux

Follow Blizzard's documentation to
get the linux version. By default, PySC2 expects the game to live in
~/StarCraftII/. You can override this path by setting the SC2PATH
environment variable or creating your own run_config.

Windows/MacOS

Install of the game as normal from Battle.net. Even the
Starter Edition will work.
If you used the default install location PySC2 should find the latest binary.
If you changed the install location, you might need to set the SC2PATH
environment variable with the correct location.

PySC2 should work on MacOS and Windows systems running Python 2.7+ or 3.4+,
but has only been thoroughly tested on Linux. We welcome suggestions and patches
for better compatibility with other systems.

Get the maps

PySC2 has many maps pre-configured, but they need to be downloaded into the SC2
Maps directory before they can be played.

To specify the agent's race, the opponent's difficulty, and more, you can pass
additional flags. Run with --help to see what you can change.

Play the game as a human

There is a human agent interface which is mainly used for debugging, but it can
also be used to play the game. The UI is fairly simple and incomplete, but it's
enough to understand the basics of the game. Also, it runs on Linux.

$ python -m pysc2.bin.play --map Simple64

In the UI, hit ? for a list of the hotkeys. The most basic ones are: F4 to
quit, F5 to restart, F9 to save a replay, and Pgup/Pgdn to control the
speed of the game. Otherwise use the mouse for selection and keyboard for
commands listed on the left.

The left side is a basic rendering. The right side is the feature layers that
the agent receives, with some coloring to make it more useful to us. You can
enable or disable RGB or feature layer rendering and their resolutions with
command-line flags.

Watch a replay

Running an agent and playing as a human save a replay by default. You can watch
that replay by running:

$ python -m pysc2.bin.play --replay <path-to-replay>

This works for any replay as long as the map can be found by the game.

The same controls work as for playing the game, so F4 to exit, pgup/pgdn
to control the speed, etc.

You can save a video of the replay with the --video flag.

List the maps

Maps need to be configured before they're known to the
environment. You can see the list of known maps by running:

$ python -m pysc2.bin.map_list

Run the tests

If you want to submit a pull request, please make sure the tests pass on both
python 2 and 3.

$ python -m pysc2.bin.run_tests

Environment Details

For a full description of the specifics of how the environment is configured,
the observations and action spaces work read the
environment documentation.

Mini-game maps

The mini-game map files referenced in the paper are stored under pysc2/maps/
but must be installed in $SC2PATH/Maps. Make sure to follow the download
instructions above.

Maps are configured in the Python files in pysc2/maps/. The configs can set
player and time limits, whether to use the game outcome or curriculum score, and
a handful of other things. For more information about the maps, and how to
configure your own, read the maps documentation.

Replays

A replay lets you review what happened during a game. You can see the actions
and observations that each player made as they played.

Blizzard is releasing a large number of anonymized 1v1 replays played on the
ladder. You can find instructions for how to get the
replay files on their
site. You can also review your own replays.

Replays can be played back to get the observations and actions made during that
game. The observations are rendered at the resolution you request, so may differ
from what the human actually saw. Similarly the actions specify a point, which
could reflect a different pixel on the human's screen, so may not have an exact
match in our observations, though they should be fairly similar.

Replays are version dependent, so a 3.16 replay will fail in a 3.16.1 or 3.17
binary.

You can visualize the replays with the full game, or with pysc2.bin.play.
Alternatively you can run pysc2.bin.replay_actions to process many replays
in parallel.